Braving Areas of Violence, Voters Try to Reshape Libya

A man cast his vote in Benghazi, Libya, on Saturday.Credit
Tomas Munita for The New York Times

BENGHAZI, Libya — Defying expectations and, in some places, bullets, Libyans across most of the country voted Saturday in the first election after more than four decades of isolation and totalitarianism under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

“We will vote for the fatherland whether there is shooting or not,” said Naema el-Gheryiene, 55, fixing a designer veil over her hair as she walked to a polling place here shortly after a gunman in a passing car had sprayed it with bullets. “Whoever dies for their country is a martyr, and even if there are explosions, we are going to vote.”

The voting was far from immaculate. Regional rivalries spilled out in armed assaults on polling places that forced the closing of several in the eastern coastal region. At least two people were killed in election-related violence, and tribal warfare around the southern city of Kufru kept some voting centers closed there as well.

But given the prevailing lawlessness in the nine months since the killing of Colonel Qaddafi, the relatively orderly election reported in most of the country surprised even the voters.

The interim government announced with pride that 94 percent of the polling places had opened despite the violence, and turnout was over 60 percent. And as vote-counting began Saturday night, ecstatic voters in cars jammed the streets of the major coastal cities of Tripoli, Benghazi and Misurata, honking madly, and waving ink-stained fingers in victory signs.

“It is the first time I ever felt this way — a feeling of freedom, and a feeling of victory,” said Juma el-Wani, 45, a water company worker lingering outside a polling place here.

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Women carrying ballots encouraged others to vote on Saturday in Benghazi during Libya’s first election in four decades.Credit
Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Many said they had braced for chaos, if not civil war. Libya went to the polls with its cities still under the control of fractious militias, reeling from bloody tribal feuds, and with armed protesters across the east determined to thwart the election for fear of domination by the country’s western region.

Few can remember the parliamentary elections once held under the monarchy that preceded Colonel Qaddafi’s 1969 coup. The vast majority of Libyans were born after he had eviscerated any civic organizations or national institutions, except perhaps his secret police. Political parties were banned.

But in some ways the country’s blank slate proved an unexpected blessing, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Libya scholar at Dartmouth who is in Tripoli for the vote. The Arab Spring revolts in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia have struggled to overcome the resistance of institutions like the police or the military and the legacies of old battles of liberals against Islamists. But Libyans were inventing a new nation virtually from scratch.

After warning throughout last year’s revolt of a descent into Somalia-like chaos of tribal infighting , Mr. Vandewalle said that Libyans so far had proved him wrong. “Who would have predicted a year ago that there would even be elections?” he asked.

Still, even amid the jubilation — joined by the young militia men in artillery-mounted pickup trucks who are both the source of Libya’s tenuous security and its scourge — there were many reminders that the vote was just the beginning of the struggle to unify the country and build a new democracy.

The vote will select a 200-member congress that was initially expected to draft a constitution while it governed the country for 18 months. But the interim Transitional National Council stripped the congress of that authority just two days before the vote in an attempt to placate easterners who protested that the congress would be stacked in favor of the more populous West around Tripoli. (One hundred members will be elected from the west, 60 from the east, and 40 from the desert south.)

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Voters in Benghazi. By midmorning on Saturday, about a hundred armed men had stormed at least one polling place there, emerging with ballot boxes as trophies.Credit
Tomas Munita for The New York Times

The council instead decreed a new election to choose a smaller panel to draft the constitution that would be composed of equal numbers from each region.

The last-minute change all but guarantees that the first move by the new congress, whose members campaigned to be part of a constitutional assembly, will be to challenge the council’s new plan and with it the legitimacy of the rest of its road map for transition. The council has pledged to dissolve itself at the seating of the new congress.

In addition to the problem of taming regional militias, the new congress will face the daunting task of choosing a new prime minister, and the electoral campaign offers few clues about how it might begin. While Libya was largely spared the polarizing debates between liberals, mainstream Islamists and their ultraconservative cousins that have riven its neighbors, it also lacks any unifying glue of a national political force like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

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After a campaign without much debate over policy or ideology, voters appeared drawn mainly to local or tribal leaders, suggesting the national congress could bring representatives of all Libya’s factions into the same room without bringing them any closer together.

The violent protests against the vote here in Benghazi Saturday, in the birthplace of the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi, were a vivid demonstration of the challenges to unifying the country. But the ultimate result may also have also served as a reminder of the determination of many Libyans to try to bring their nation together.

In the days leading up to the vote, protesters angry at the distribution of seats in the congress attacked polling stations and burned ballots here and in other eastern cities. On Friday night, they downed a Libyan Air Force helicopter carrying voting supplies, killing an election official. And on Saturday fresh attacks on election facilities across the east damaged voting materials in as many as three polling centers in Benghazi.

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Women left a polling station in Benghazi on Saturday as security officials watched the streets.Credit
Tomas Munita for The New York Times

By midmorning on Saturday, about 100 men armed with rifles, machetes and rocket-propelled grenades had gathered around a traffic circle in Benghazi where the old flag of the eastern province, Cyrenaica, flew above the new Libyan flag.

“We are not against voting, but it should be fair to all Libyans,” a civil engineer, Khalid Assubihi, 49, said. “We had a bad dictator for 40 years. We are afraid for our children if there is no justice.” And he hinted of violence: “When the government is pushing people, you can’t predict what will happen.”

Moments later, the crowd was firing rifles wildly into the air and raising rocket-propelled grenades to their shoulders as they stormed into a polling station. Within fifteen minutes, the mob re-emerged with at least seven red-topped translucent ballot boxes and stacks of voter rolls that they brandished as trophies.

But even such an armed minority had only a limited potential to disrupt the outpouring of enthusiasm for the vote that soon swept the city. When the attackers moved toward a second, more heavily guarded polling place at the nearby Yousef Bouker School, the voters sprang to its defense. About three dozen unarmed men lined up to form a human wall to keep the protesters from the polling place. “Whoever wants to sacrifice himself up the front,” shouted a man organizing the defense.

Perhaps perversely, the abundance of arms left over from the fight against Colonel Qaddafi may have helped defend the vote as well. In some places, neighbors brought their own Kalashnikovs to protect polling places.

The violence was not over. In Ajdabiya, one protester was reported killed and two others wounded by fighters defending a polling center, and after nightfall in Benghazi a fighter was killed in an attack on the anti-election protesters.

Still, many expressed relief at the limited nature of the skirmishes. “To be honest, we were surprised,” said Omar Mohamed Omar, 28, a member of a dark-skinned ethnic group displaced from their hometown, Tuwarga, who voted in a refugee camp here. “Thank god, we now feel like any other Libyans.”

And waiting in line inside the Yousef Bouker school, Badi Mustafa, 58, an oil company employee, said he was not worried about the protests, or for that matter who might win seats in the congress: “They will all be Libyans. They will work for the future of Libya. Everything will be O.K.”

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Libya Holds Vote After 40 Years Of Dictatorship. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe